Neil Lennon has shared his view on why VAR is not working in Scotland after what he saw given against Celtic at Tynecastle yesterday.
The decisions given have been poured over to the nth degree now and whilst many people the refereeing technology is ruining the game in Scotland, Lennon takes a different view.
Whilst it cannot be denied that VAR has gotten many decisions wrong since its introduction over 18 months ago, Lennon thinks it’s the people in control of the technology and not the tech itself that’s the issue.
Lennon said [Superscoreboard], “Look, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with VAR. I think it’s the people that make the decisions. The technology is there to aid those decision makers and we’ve debated this morning with the guys even here.
“You have to say that all the decisions apart from the offside for Lawrence Shankland were wrong. I didn’t think Celtic’s was a penalty and certainly didn’t think it was a red card.
“Again, Yang, there is no real intent though. He’s just trying to flick the ball over Cochrane’s head. A yellow card would have sufficed.
“I don’t understand, I know people say he was endangering the player. He wasn’t. I’ve seen people endanger players with high boots and that certainly wasn’t the case from Yang.”
“And the penalty that Hearts got was beyond belief, that decision for me. Iwata has got his eyes closed. He’s been bumped by Johnston, the ball lands on his arm and they come to the conclusion of a penalty so I understand Brendan‘s frustrations.”
And that is the fundamental flaw in the system. you can introduce technology all you want to try and rule out human error but if it is still humans in charge of it, there is still potential for those errors to be made.
But with VAR it is simple. It seems that in Scotland we are not using to cut out mistakes. It looks like we use it to find anything to either chop off a goal, send off a player or anything to take the advantage away from the attacking team.
And until that is addressed and the people in charge of VAR start utilising it for what is brought in for, scenes like Sunday at Tynecastle will be witnessed more and more as the season draws to a close.
In other news, Chris Sutton makes claim about referees after controversy in Celtic game yesterday
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